Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) (29 page)

“You’re mine,” Keaton whispered, in that closed room so saturated with the hot stench of lust.  The lust had even taken Rayburn.

“Yes,” the Focus said.  “I’m yours.  Please, whatever you want.  Anything.  I’m yours.”  Oh, those magic words.  This,
this
was the way you tagged an enemy.

The juice moved.

Only now would Pitre tell us all she knew of the first Focuses.

And what she told us about first Focus Fingleman, the long-time supposed ally of the Arms, was enough to curdle all our souls.  Enough to make me wonder if Keaton’s way was better than my chosen path.

Not enough to make me reconsider my desire to kill Bass, though.

I sat on the floor and leaned against Keaton’s legs, still lethargic after the intensity and release of the Focus-breaking.  The mid-morning light wafted over both of us, barely warm.  Rayburn entertained the Focus downstairs, teaching her some basic Arm courtesies.  Bass had retreated to the basement as well, evoking screams from one of the heartier prisoners, loud enough to test Keaton’s soundproofing.  In a little while, they would all be back again for another round of questioning.  To my senses, Keaton’s foul den had shrunk to the size of a closet, the polluted detritus of lust and pain stacked sideways upon themselves, always behind my back, always just out of sight, always ready to jump me.

Keaton rubbed my hair and I flinched, still twitchy. She scratched lazily behind my ears.  I wondered, morosely, whether if she did that enough, the psychological effects would cause me to grow ears like a dog.

“Are you going to give me any trouble about orders, Hancock?”  Keaton said, lethargic herself.

“Not unless you tell me to kiss and make up with Fingleman,” I said.  The bitch had not only spied on us for years, she had been the one who sold us out to Wandering Shade.  Repeatedly.  Keaton snorted.  “Ma’am, please don’t go after the firsts piecemeal.  You won’t be able to take Patterson or Fingleman if you do so.”  My advice meant nothing to Keaton.

The stroking hand stopped, and she held my hair in a tight grip.  “I’m still not happy with your level of cooperation.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry.  You know I always want to serve you to the best of my abilities, but this is a strategic disaster.  Please, ma’am.”

“Shut up, asshole,” Keaton said, hard-edged and lethargy gone.  “I know your position and I’ve made my decision.  It’s time for you to shut the fuck up and follow orders.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.  Instincts pulled me closer toward her, hoping to appease her anger with my humble presence.  I rubbed my cheek against her thigh.  I’m yours, love me, indulge me.  I’m not dropping your tag.  I’ll follow your orders.

Hopeless.

“I gave you plenty of room since the Focuses betrayed us so you can work on your projects.  You can’t expect to get things right every time.”

“Ma’am.”

“I’ve got a shitload of work for you, and you’re not going to have any time to spare for your personal projects.  You’re back to working full time for me.  If Haggerty objects, either take back your rightful position over her or die trying.”  Fuck.  “So I ask you again, are you going to give me any trouble about orders?”

“No, ma’am.  I’m yours.  I follow orders.”

“Good.  Now pay attention,” Keaton said.  “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

Something Arm Egregious and Evil

“Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.” – Aldous Huxley

Gilgamesh: October 19, 1972

“I can’t find her either,” Gilgamesh said.  His hands shook and he fought off the urge to find somewhere to hide.  He couldn’t remember not being able to find Tiamat in the flow, not since he had mastered pheromone flow scrying.  “I don’t…”

“Something happened,” Gail said, interrupting him.  He tensed and forced himself to relax.  “I couldn’t find her in the Dreaming, and, well, I didn’t think that was possible for someone I’m linked to.”  Gail had spent four hours last night and early this morning in her Dreaming box, after awakening from sleep having dreamt about Carol in agony.

They met in his room, even more cluttered than Gail’s.  Somehow sleeping with boxes of surplus family items, extra furniture and the like made the place homier.  He had spent too much time as a Crow to appreciate mattresses; for too many years mattresses came from dumps and were most often beyond disgusting.  Fresh linens wadded into a nest worked better for him, and in his cluttered room he could vary where he slept every night.  There were just so many possibilities.

He enjoyed Gail’s response to his three-dimensional maze of a room.  She loved it.  They were both wadded together, Gail nestled with her head on Gilgamesh’s shoulder, under a child’s desk about ten feet as the Crow crawled from the door to the room.  Gail spent more time touching him, and more time dampening her sexual responses to him with her charisma.  He expected Gail would be jealous of the time he spent with her household women, as that had been Lori’s response to Sky’s dalliances (and why Gilgamesh had never dallied with any of Lori’s women), but Gail not only wasn’t jealous, she encouraged him.  ‘Just don’t break too many hearts,’ had been her only warning.  Instead of a Focus foible, objections to sleeping with the household women had proven to be a Lori foible.

“I don’t believe Keaton killed her,” Gilgamesh said.  He hugged Gail closer.  “I would know.”  When he had been in the flow he sensed the Progenitors were unhappy with what had happened to Tiamat.  He didn’t tell Gail, Gail not being happy with the interference of the Progenitors.  “We can’t do anything about it, anyway.  Which, as always, makes me nervous.”  And with Gail sitting essentially in his lap, if he wasn’t careful he would make a pass at her.  “Distract me, please?”

Gail shrugged and closed her eyes.  “Daisy and Van finally finished collating the boxes of information we got from Mr. Collins.”

“The information I got,” Gilgamesh said, amused.  Gail snorted, but she did nod to acknowledge his contribution.  “Anything on what Chrysanthemum is?”

“Mr. Collins had information on three Chrysanthemum contacts: Ajax, Cassandra and Mask.  Mask of course is Wandering Shade, and he used a Kansas City PO box, and he was only active in 1967, 1968 and 1969.  Ajax verified Mask as a legit Chrysanthemum contact, but we don’t know if this was real or bogus.”

“Interesting.  All this went through the Kansas City lab run by United Toxicol?”

“Nope.  Only Mask dealt directly with the KC lab.  The Ajax and Cassandra contacts came second hand, through Toxicol’s Denver and Newark offices.”

“So Mr. Collins never possessed contact information on Ajax and Cass…?”

“Nope, we got lucky,” Gail said.  Her interruption startled him again, but instead of noticing or otherwise reacting, she rested her head on the angle of his chest, below his shoulder, and snuggled closer.  “The results of the lab work they ordered didn’t all get sent to the same places, and some of the ‘send to’ information got inadvertently copied into Mr. Collins personal records.  We found locations for four: Kansas City, Salem Oregon, Charleston West Virginia and the CDC’s Virginia Transform Detention Center.  We don’t know which ones got sent to which alias, save for the Kansas City address.”

“Anything else?”

“Mr. Collins referred to Bass as ‘Patient 172’.  Patient 172 came to them after she killed a Dr. Littleside in Denver, and Mr. Collins wrote in his notes that he suspected Chrysanthemum got to Patient 172 and set her up to assassinate Dr. Littleside because of Dr. Littleside’s investigation of an assassination attempt on some other Doctor in Boston.  This implies he knew Chrysanthemum was a Major Transform operation.”

Gilgamesh bit his upper lip.  “The Boston doctor’s Hank.  The FBI tried to assassinate him in December of ’66, using Monster-generated élan,” he said.  “How can the assassination attempt be connected to this?  Who are Ajax and Casssandra, anyway?”

Gail shook her head, worried.  She let the quiet build for a minute while she traced patterns in the underside of the desk above their heads.  “Did I ever tell you how I met Sylvie?” she said, breaking the silent spell.

Gilgamesh said “No,” and they went on to speak of safer topics.

Carol Hancock: October 19, 1972 – October 20, 1972

I didn’t go back to Detroit, not immediately.  I had paid a high price to keep Hank as mine, and I needed to finish the job.  Out of the fiasco at Keaton’s home, I had sacrificed my status, my ability to suppress my beast, and my ability to work on making the world better instead of making the world worse.  I had worked for years as a young Arm to become one of the good guys instead of one of the bad guys.  In a day, I lost everything except Hank and Littleside and my rights to Chicago.  The Arms remained a functional group, and we would be taking down the first Focuses, which might not be the smart thing to do, but did have appeal.

I stopped first in Chicago, got my mission RV, Gomorrah, out of storage, reactivated my dormant Chicago crew and started some of my Detroit people moving their operations back here.  I leaned on an associate, who didn’t know me as an Arm, to cough up a tiny abandoned light industrial factory and parked Gomorrah inside.  I welcomed myself to my new home.  The place stank of grease and paint thinner, and had a large basement.

I hired a cleanup crew to clear the place out and make it livable.  Then I went to Littleside and set up camp in an unused section.  Hank hoped to study Transform geriatrics here someday, the process of aging in Transforms, which was different from normals, but that would require some time when external emergencies didn’t monopolize my time and my money.

The section still smelled of fresh paint and construction.  I lifted a desk and office chair from the office of a doctor I hadn’t yet found time to recruit, and a cot from a containment cell.  A desk and a bed, all the necessities of life.  I would live here until my crew fixed up my new place.  Mine.  Chicago was mine again.

My mind drowned in my beast.  Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw my most recent torture victims, and I became aroused again.  I decided, with Chicago mine again, to end this nonsense.  I sat on my cot, meditated, focused my will and my juice, and ditched Bass’s tag.

The tag didn’t go.

I sat upright, eyes wide and nervous, my body shaking in fear.  An Arm could always drop a tag.  This was unprecedented.  I metasensed around and, no, nobody played with me.  I burned juice into my metasense to make sure.  I carefully did a metasense scan of myself for juice-active implants, a theoretical fear Gilgamesh and I had come up with as one of our worst-case scenarios for bad enemy weaponry.  Nothing.  I had peed out Bass’s chemical concoctions over a day ago, my body working just as it should.

I found nothing out of order, suspicious, or fucking
anything
.

After quieting my Crow-worthy panic, I sat down on my cot again and went deeper into my meditations, deep enough to pick up the harsh electronic buzz of Hank’s lab equipment almost a hundred feet away.  I attempted again to ditch the Bass tag, and again I failed.  I burned five points of juice into the process, trying every trick I knew and some Gilgamesh and I had dreamt up to try as experiments someday, including a self-tag variant in an attempt to overlay Bass’s tag.

Nothing.  The tag would not budge.

Worse, the more I prodded the fucking thing, the more my beast awoke.

Still meditating, I did a complete memory review of my Keaton visit.  I ran a time check, and, yes, I was missing about 40 minutes of time, all while under Bass’s chemical assault.  The bitch
had
done something to me.  Again.  More tricks along the lines of what she did to me when I invaded her lair and shut down her industrial torture project.

I got so angry I found a defenseless wall and beat my fist bloody.

---

“I joined up with Keaton’s Arms, I ditched the Cause and I’ve reclaimed Chicago,” I said, harsh.  “Live with the changes, or do I need to reestablish who’s boss around here?”

I didn’t face my tagged Arms, I faced Hank Zielinski, my treasure I had sacrificed so much to keep.  He was a far tougher audience than my Arms, and I needed to get to him
first
.  He stood with his back against the wall of Lab Three, his private Littleside work area.  He was as white as Denise Pitre had been, but he still kept arguing.  Hell, I hadn’t been this stubborn with Keaton.  Computer printouts and punch cards littered the floor from the winter winds of my anger.

He should know better than to attempt to defy me, but, well,
Hank
.  He remained mine, but being mine didn’t mean he didn’t need discipline.  I started toward him in a stalk.  In my mind, I saw the screaming young man I held in my power yesterday, as Bass loomed behind me in Keaton’s basement and called forth my beast.

The young man hadn’t lasted two hours.

“Commander!”  Zielinski’s voice was low and intent, and he focused his eyes on my bloody knuckles, still smarting from my assault a half hour ago on the defenseless wall.  He yanked on my tag like the pro he was.  “You’re the Commander!  Find us a way through this disaster.”  I held his neck in my hand and heard his heart race.  I picked up on the faint odor of the tag I had marked him with years ago.  I didn’t respond.  He might have superhuman will, but his resistance to torture and violence was, truthfully, below the
human
norm.  I grabbed his left thumb and twisted,
just right
.

“Carol,” he said, terrified and in pain, but he still tried to affect me with his words.  Fool.  Dead inside, I hungered for pain.  I was my own enemy now, working against my long term plans.

“Keaton won’t get everything right,” Zielinski said, his voice barely choked out of his throat.  Implacable, indomitable.  “Figure out contingencies.  What do we do if her plans go wrong?  What if she succeeds?  Where are her plans likely to go wrong, and what do we do about it then?  You’re the Commander.  We’re counting on you.”

The Commander was gone in a bunny suit.  What a joke.  I remained Keaton’s lowest rank flunky.  I wore
Bass’s
tag.

Zielinski, though?  I might not be anyone else’s Commander, but I remained his.

I dropped him and turned away.  Several long moments passed before I spoke.  Zielinski waited with his imperturbable patience.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said, my voice a distant Crow whisper.  “I’ve been torturing people for the last two days.  Under orders.  You know what giving in to the torture urges does to me.”

Zielinski nodded and massaged his neck.  “You don’t believe Keaton’s going to succeed at taking the first Focuses,” he said, not a question.

I shook my head, appalled again at the idea of going after the Focuses one at a time, in the process giving the later targets plenty of warning and time to prepare.  “Keaton’s tactics may be good, but the strategy’s bad.  She’ll succeed for a while, and then her plan will blow up in her face.  In all our faces.”

“How?”

I shrugged.  “How the hell should I know?  There are a million different ways this piece of drek could go bad.”

“Can you come up with contingencies?  Plans for what to do after this falls apart?”  I remained silent, contemplating the cascade of punch cards on the floor.  I hoped he hadn’t kept any valuable information in the stack, or if he did he possessed some way to sort them again.  In a while, I nodded.

“Out of a million, a few are more likely than others.”  What had set Keaton off?  The two boxes of Crow research Sinclair dropped off?  That drivel?  Nothing made sense.

Zielinski sat back down on his stool, his legs unsteady from my unwise abuse.

“What about Gail?” he said, focusing on business instead of the angry Arm.  “Did Keaton flat out forbid you to help Gail and work on the juice moving project, or do you have some wiggle room?”

“The constraint is on my time.  I’m under new orders, and my responsibilities don’t leave me more than a few hours a week with Gail.”  I would be spending far too much of my time following Bass’s orders, feeding my beast.

I couldn’t tell Hank I carried Bass’s tag and didn’t know how to ditch it.  I wanted to, but something in my head blocked me.  I responded to my discovery with a low growl.

“All right, that’s bad, but it isn’t the end of the world.”  I could hear the schemes in his head through his voice.  “We can keep working.  Ever since Lori came through in August we’re making excellent progress.”

Lori.  He wanted me to hear the name ‘Lori’ from his lips.  Why?  Oh.  Of course.  Smart man.

“Too late.  Even if we make our breakthrough and I get juice from Gail, Keaton won’t change direction.”